Scranaj
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Posted - 2007.12.21 12:51:00 -
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Apologies for the necro-bump. I'm bored at work ( again ) and in the abscence of Trolls to bait....
I've been playing online games since the days of the early text based MUDS and MUSH's. 20-30 people online at the same time was awsome back then. I skipped EQ and Ultima mainly because I found the text muds I was playing to be more fun - Check out the Discworld mud for a flavour of how good they can be.
I started playing FFXI Online and stuck with it for a good long while, getting a couple of jobs to 75, and belive me, in that game it's no mean feat. Add's a whole new meaning to the word Grind. XP loss and De-level due to death? 5 day spawn timers on major bosses? You've come to the right place. It was still a fun glame to play though, just becasue it's Final Fantasy :)
Finally I got sucked into WoW because my other half started playing it. We'd been playing FFXI together but she ran out of patience for grinding before I did.
As has been said in the thread WoW is the lowest common denominator in MMO's. Blizzard have deliberately taken everything that works in an MMO and removed all the things that people didn't like. Result, a game anyone can play and have some fun with but which lacks many of the "challenging" features of other MMO's. It's extremely linear, has a very low difficulty level and no penalties for failure. How long you carry on having fun with it will vary according to how low your boredom threshold is. I've been playing for about 9 months now and I'm just about there, which is why I ended up here.
WoW is a "safe" game by default. No PvP unless you explicitly want it, death carries no real penalties, failed a mission?; just go back and try again. Even if you do want PvP, losing costs you nothing but some bruised ego.
Now I'm not going to be jumping straight into 0.0 from the word go here. I'm enjoying mission running in High Sec right now while I find my feet and get some cash together. Plus it reminds me of the days I spent playing Elite on my old BBC Micro :) Once I get my act together though I'll be right in there.
The main difference I see here, not that I've been here long admittedly, is that this is the first really openended, sandbox MMO of any kind. No restrictions by race, class, specialization etc. You really can do anything you want from the word go. No worrying about group composition, repeatedly running the same instanced encounters just to get that one rare item, not being stuck with a specific build on your toon because you wont get group invites with anything else.
I can understand why people will complain about this. There is no hand holding from the game itself, no structured progression. Everything is down to the individual player to decide. This, in part, means that the player base within the game is much more coherant than in WoW. In Eve, as I see it, you join a Corp largely because they have the same aims in the game as you do, but not all Corps have the same aims, if you see what I mean.
In WoW everyone has the same aim. Lvl, gear, Endgame raid and/or PvP. Rinse and repeat. In Eve you pick your own goals and work with likeminded people to achieve them.
This is all my impression of Eve so far anyway. There was probably no real point to this post other than to waste 15 mins while I wait to leave work, as this is my last day before the Christmas break. If you read this far, well done, have a mince pie and please don't pod me if you see me in game :)
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